Men know how to strategically piss off their opponents

Anger your opponent before tests of self-control, not feats of strength.

Anger has long been associated with competitive situations—that’s why hockey has a penalty box, soccer has red cards, and basketball has flagrant fouls. A new study in PNAS delved into this relationship and found that anger has a complicated effect in competitions, sometimes boosting performance and other times making it worse. What’s more, the results suggest that men actually use anger strategically to get the better of their opponents. This strategy is called the Materazzi effect, after the Italian soccer player Marco Materazzi, who angered rival Zinedine Zidane enough to get him ejected from the World Cup final in 2006.

The Materazzi effect earns its name.

To examine the competitive consequences of anger, the researchers recruited some of the most outwardly competitive people out there: college men. They randomly paired up 260 participants and assigned each pair to play one of two games.

Strong man

The first game was a test of strength. The two players faced off over two rounds to see which had a stronger grip as measured by a hand dynamometer. After the first round, one player—called the “decision maker”—was given a chance to anger the other: he could assign his opponent to do between zero and twenty minutes of what the researchers called “boring administrative tasks” once the game was over. The other player was notified of the decision maker’s choice before the second round of the game.

The idea was that being assigned bouts of tedious work would anger the player and subsequently affect his performance in the game. The researchers surveyed the players to make sure that being assigned this work did make them mad, and that the decision makers knew it.

To test the effect of anger, the researchers compared players’ grip strength in the second round to that in the first round. Players that were given the full 20-minute assignment performed much better in round two—after they had been angered—than those that were assigned less work, or none at all. In games of strength, being mad actually seems to improve performance.

The duel

But in a second game that tested players’ patience and self-restraint, anger actually impaired performance.

In this computerized “duel” game, players started 20 steps apart, and in each turn they could choose either to take one step forward or to shoot at their opponent. Each time a player stepped forward, their odds of hitting the other player increased, from zero in the first turn to one once they met in the middle. Each player could only shoot once; if they hit their opponent, they were declared the winner, but if they missed, their opponent won. In this game, the optimal strategy would be to shoot when the odds exceeded 0.5. The same anger manipulation was used in this game before the round began.

Angered players didn’t wait to shoot; those that had been assigned the full 20 minutes of work shot first in 70 percent of the trials, and they tended to take their shot before the odds got to 0.5. The less work a player was assigned, the more likely he was to wait to shoot until the odds improved.

It’s clear from these results that anger affects performance, but that the direction of the effect depends on the type of competition. In games of strength, getting mad is advantageous. But when self-control is on the line, anger can be a handicap.

Strategy matters

The researchers uncovered another, subtler, result as well. In each of these games, the decision makers were often using anger to their advantage. In the strength game, the decision makers assigned the full 20 minutes of work in less than half of the trials. But in the duel, the full time was assigned in nearly two-thirds of the trials. Additionally, decision makers assigned more minutes of work in the duel than they did in the strength game. In other words, players were more likely to make their opponents mad in a competition when anger impaired performance compared to one where anger was an advantage.

But there’s a catch: when the angered player was given a 20-minute period to “cool off” before playing, the effect disappeared. This cool-down period offset the consequences of anger in both the strength game and the duel. The decision makers were able to anticipate this effect; in trials with a delay, there was no difference between the two types of games in the number of minutes of work assigned.

Some of these findings may seem intuitive, especially in light of the finding that competitors manipulate anger as a strategy against their opponents. But until these effects are better understood and measured quantitatively, it’s impossible to include them in any sort of theory or model of competition. In a larger sense, this study is just one step along the tortuous path of understanding the complex relationship between emotions and behavior.

Kate Shaw Yoshida
Kate is a science writer for Ars Technica. She recently earned a dual Ph.D. in Zoology and Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Behavior from Michigan State University, studying the social behavior of wild spotted hyenas. Emailkate.shaw@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KateYoshida

As you say, study is necessary. Any indications from preliminary results as to whether this effect is likely to be hormone-level-related (testosterone, adrenaline and so on) or whether it's a more general psychological effect?

I was in a LAN group years ago that met frequently. One of the guys was by far one of the most skilled among us but he also suffered from a terrible temper. Quite a few games we just harassed him in game to force a drop and then roll the other team. We were (still are, actually) all good friends, but this was war! As soon as we heard him hit the table we knew we had the game in hand.

Funny, I'm no fan of football at all, but just reading the headline, before I jumped to the article, I immediately thought about Zidane headbutt on Materazzi.Well, for French people, I guess that was the biggest 'pissing off' event in all football history..

That's why the word mad bridges being pissed off and being insane. When you're pissed off you are energized. When you are insane you will most likely screw up.

There's a sweet point in the madness range where you are energized enough to take a challenge and insane enough to take an unusual path to success. Behind every scientific discovery there's usually a mad scientist.

The headline makes it seem as if specifically Men know these things, and Women do not. Curious to know if Women were included in the study and this was actually found to be the case. If women weren't included in the study... well that would seem like an odd restriction on the test subjects and a missed opportunity.

Those interested in earlier applied research might want to read Stephen Potter's books from the '50s: The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship or The Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating, and the follow ups One-upmanship and Lifemanship.

The headline makes it seem as if specifically Men know these things, and Women do not. Curious to know if Women were included in the study and this was actually found to be the case. If women weren't included in the study... well that would seem like an odd restriction on the test subjects and a missed opportunity.

college men were tested. Fascinating concept. I would like some objective testing of anger levels, biometric galvanic skin response, muscle tension, heart rate. Also need to test women and mixed groups.

It would be interesting to see how this applies to activities, like sports or warfare, that require both strength and self-control. Presumably, anger is more beneficial to (American) football players than to golfers, and more useful for front-line troops than for snipers.

I hear that most often in Warthunder, and usually by somebody who just got a tirade of abuse because they rammed somebody else with their plane. When somebody does it to me, I just call on the rest of the team to hunt them down while I focus on the ground objectives we need to win.

Ya I found the name of the article to be rather misleading and sexist once I found out that women were not part of the experiments.

The article is seemingly trying to perpetuate the competitive male stereotype.

No conclusion can be drawn about women based on this experiment, thus the headline saying "men" is correct. The finding is likely to be true of all adults though. Children may not be sophisticated enough to use anger strategically.

Materazzi deserves zero credit for this, atheletes have been doing this for years if not centuries. See John Starks and Reggie Miller from ’93. In interviews after the fact; it’s pretty obvious Reggie was intentionally pushing his buttons and winning the mind games.

Materazzi deserves zero credit for this, atheletes have been doing this for years if not centuries. See John Starks and Reggie Miller from ’93. In interviews after the fact; it’s pretty obvious Reggie was intentionally pushing his buttons and winning the mind games.

I agree. All the best sports involve undermining the mental state of your opponent. In NRL games it often gets bad enough to cause fist fights, as an entire team gangs up on one player to bully him into loosing his cool.

This test only studied men therefore the conclusion was only for men, but I'm fairly sure if it studied everybody this title would be changed to "Humans".

I'd like to see a study done... but I suspect this is an area where women and men generally differ.

Studies I've heard about have indicated that the two are similarly competitive on average -- but that how it's expressed (like openly competitive vs. more subtly) is extremely influenced in a person's childhood by what adults assumed or expected from the kids, the ways different peers reacted to their behavior, how boys/girls were depicted in shows, which behaviors are encouraged in shows aimed at the kid's gender**, and stuff like that.

**try comparing 1980s Strawberry Shortcake, Rainbow Brite and My Little Pony to G.I. Joe, Transformers, and He-Man. (Quite a few girls were fans of Transformers & He-Man, so we got a mix of the two sets of messages, but I don't recall boys openly into the girls' toys/shows.)

That's why the word mad bridges being pissed off and being insane. When you're pissed off you are energized. When you are insane you will most likely screw up.

There's a sweet point in the madness range where you are energized enough to take a challenge and insane enough to take an unusual path to success. Behind every scientific discovery there's usually a mad scientist.

And i speculate that said sweet spot was what berserkers of old were going for.